For decades, the US Army's MPs have gotten the short end of the stick. Given the mission of protecting the rear areas of any military ground operation, they have long been forced to rely on deploying unarmored HMMWVs with only one of the Heavy Squad's weapons mounted on the roof. After land mines destroyed a few Hummers in Kosovo, they got some shiny new M1114 uparmored HMMWVs, but only a few. They got a lot more of them for operating in Iraq, too.

However, Iraq and the widespread use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) got them something better than a HUMVEE. In Iraq, they get to use the M1117 Armored Security Vehicle. The M1117 is a direct descendent of the Cadillac Gage manufactured M706 armored cars used primarily by the United States Air Force for base security in the Vietnam War era. The M1117 is a state of the art light armored vehicle to meet the transportation, protection, and firepower needs of the MP Heavy Squad, a team of three men that must lug around and deploy both an M-2 Browning .50 cal. MG and a Mk. 19 Automatic Grenade Launcher.

With the M1117, both weapons are turret mounted in a fashion that keeps all weapons activity, including reloading, under the protection of the vehicle's armored shell. Additionally, with a top speed of 63 mph, it is designed to move faster than most transport vehicles in convoy, making it an exceptional route scout and convoy patrol vehicle.

The M1117 in the last 6 years has proven to be quite successful. As of 2011, 14 variants exist and while the United States is still the primary user, the vehicle has also been sold to Bulgaria and Colombia, Canada is considering a major purchase of up to 500 vehicles to make it the second largest user and Afghanistan has ordered 440 to make it the third largest user.

Along with detailing all current variants of the vehicle, we also provide a brief on the history from the original Cadillac Gage XM706 armored car to the current Textron vehicle line. We also provide information on the MEXAS applique armor system that is critical the the M1117's success, the weapon turret it chares with the USMC's AAV-7A1, and the various weapon systems it carries.

This product supercedes ATN11007 - Big Bang Ricochet 007: The M1117 Guardian ASV, originally published in 2005. This is a major enhancement over the previous edition, expanded from 10 pages to 44.

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.